Went Off Looking for a Better Way

On a pretty regular basis, something I write in this space hits a nerve with (I'm guessing) someone who's spent their lives in The Rose of New England and who, from their perspective considers me a thorn and boy do they let me know about it. 

That's more than fair. If/when you want to reach me, I'm not that hard to find. Admittedly they did take my picture off the side of the milk carton but not so much because I was scaring the kids but because I was souring the milk. But, as we used to say back in the analog days, 'I'm in the book.'

Kidding aside (yeah, that was an attempt at humor. Sometimes I try too hard; next time I'll try softer) if I had a dime for every time, anyone, in the course of disagreeing with me about something told me 'you're not from here,' I could afford to move to many of the places those same folks have wished I'd go to (I could leave the winter coats here). And yet, here we are, so many people in the same device.

Whether we agree (you and I or either of us with somebody else), an important key to a successful life here on the ant farm with beepers is communication. There's not a lot of other places for any of us to go so getting along in some manner is essential if we want to remain at the top of the food chain. 

And successful communication involves both speaking and listening and some of us, myself included, can have problems with one or both of those skills. We all had a chance last night on the largest stage in the world, the US Presidential debates, to listen to a pair of widely divergent visions of what our country is, and what we ourselves are and could be about.

Ideally (and I'm not suggesting it wasn't but your mileage may vary) it was a golden opportunity to look past the banners and slogans and put aside the slickly produced videos and attempt to listen for real-world, real-time solutions to a myriad of challenges and problems that we are facing. 

The speed of light, I'm told, is much faster than the speed of sound which is why so many people seeking office can look good until you hear what they have to say. We each will decide for ourselves, I'm guessing, as to which man met and mastered his moment last night but no matter who you think it is, we can agree that we need all the good ideas we can get right now.

I'll bet if we each made a list of five (or ten or twenty) issues we feel are facing our nation right now, we'd have more in common than we have different. Sometimes the devil is in the detail and how we achieve and maintain life and liberty while in the pursuit of happiness is where our paths diverge. My point: the issues are relatively self-evident but developing equitable and sustainable answers can be a little tricky.

To be honest, I'm not sure as I've aged, that I've not grown more set in my ways and more prone to present myself as a man whose mind is already made up so don't confuse me with facts. I'm also not sure I'm alone in being that way but I fear it's not making the way ahead any easier for any of the those whom we choose to represent us.

It's tempting to just throw up our hands and wish a plague on both houses (I was looking for work as a smiter, but the temp agency thought I said spider but I don't have enough legs) but that's not going to do any of us any good. H.L. Mencken more than once suggested we get the government we deserve, and it's up to each of us to prove him wrong, for all of our sakes. 
-bill kenny

Tick, Tick, Tick

Here's a warm-up riddle for you in preparation for the first Presidential debate of 2020, tonight on just about every platform at 9 PM. 

How many reasons should you have for watching former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump offer their visions for the direction of our country? 

This many, (and counting) and then on November 3rd, you should vote the orange-hued pus sac out of office and into a prison cell along with his grifter family and his grafter coterie of enablers and greedheads.    

-bill kenny

And You in Your Autumn Sweater

Between us, I expected a little more from the first weekend of Autumn 2020. but like so much else over the last six or so months, what was not to be was, indeed, not to be. 

We'd had a return of summer temperatures (almost) and summer skies earlier in the week that carried over into Saturday but when I set off for a walk to the Harbor late yesterday morning (those Bayern Munich vs. TSG Hoffenheim soccer matches aren't going to watch themselves, you know), we'd had a little bit of precipitation that added a lot of humidity to the air and a somewhat somber and grey canopy overhead as I made my way down Washington Street.

In my younger days, it's a walk that I could do in about eighteen minutes but the calendar with my younger days was discarded a long time ago and it seems every time now when I make this hike it takes longer and longer. Perhaps, without my knowledge, the city fathers (and others) have made Norwich larger. I really should ask about that, I suppose.

The waters of the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers that form the Norwich Harbor were as slate-grey as the sky above them and even the waterfowl in forlorn search of a handout only reluctantly settled into the water. It was a good day to walk up all of Broadway with the downtown (such as it is) at your back, past the Little Plains Park, the Cathedral of Saint Patrick, and follow Broadway back to Chelsea Parade stopping as I do every year to take a picture of a tree in a front yard of people I once knew. The tree remains but they are gone.

 As I neared Lincoln Avenue I was struck by the differences in the turning of the leaves on two different branches of the same tree. Sadly beautiful but also beautifully sad.
-bill kenny

Lips That Would Kiss Form Prayers to Broken Stone

Today at sunset is Yom Kippur, for those of the Jewish faith, the day of atonement. It is a day of repentance and fasting for personal and community/communal sins committed in the course of the last year in the hope of forgiveness-with forgiveness being the critically important aspect.

I was raised a Catholic who was taught to see Jews as (also) people of the Book (the Bible) but who limited themselves to the Old Testament and a God of Vengeance and Punishment. Jesus, as I remember, came, we were taught, to fulfill the Old Testament and by so doing and living, and dying, create a New Testament. I think my problem with Holy Mother Church became reconciling the New God with the one from the Old Testament. After all, what kind of a loving Father would crucify His own Son?

Too many years later and music such as this to mark the commencement of the Day of Atonement has convinced me while I may have lost faith in my church, I'm not sure I've abandoned a belief in God if that's Who inspired such beauty, majesty and ineffable sorrow in one piece of music.

Present-day Israel surrounded on three sides by enemies and on the fourth by the sea could not be in a more precarious position than the Jewish people themselves have been since the start of The Common Era. And yet, countless persecutions later, they stand, self-anointed as God's Chosen and regardless of your own religious beliefs or depth of your persuasion, you have to admire their devotion to Him and their belief of His providence for them.

Yom Kippur ends tomorrow evening. There's this prayer to marks its end, a version of which (though not the one I offer here) I found online recorded at a synagogue, perhaps the only synagogue to this day (I actually don't know), in Frankfurt am Main. 

A house of worship I can still see clearly in my memory from the strassenbahn fenster as I passed the Sud-Bahnof on the trip back and forth to work for many of the years I lived in Deutschland. I have to assume it is still there.

I traveled a long way to some nearly-forgotten point in my own past I thought I had passed out of and all it took was an act of faith, though not mine or my own, to return.
-bill kenny 

There's No Need for Argument

I'm betting you can guess what song I'm listening to in my head at this moment.

No, sorry; Sugar, Sugar was yesterday. Try again.
-bill kenny

A Reprise and a Respite

I'd seen Bruce Springsteen perform maybe a dozen and a half times (or more) before he signed with CBS Records. I was an undergraduate commuter student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. A commuter was a fancy name for townie which was what more than half the campus was, and we could have known that if we hadn't worked so hard to avoid knowing one another.

The Rutgers campus in the early seventies was still pretty small and somnambulant. There was Rutgers College and across town, Douglass (Residential) College for Women, and then out by the Johnson and Johnson manufacturing complex off Route One towards Landis Ford was the Ag School, later to be called Cook College of Environmental Sciences before whatever it is now. This was all before the big-time college football bug bit everyone and the campus sprawl that took over Piscataway Township

The basketball team played its home games in a gym with an Olympic swimming pool in the balcony-regarded as very avant-garde for its time we were told. Most of the RC campus was between Buccaleuh Park and the Johnson & Johnson Office complex. As a comms major, I hovered around Voorhees Hall, across from the green where Willie the Silent (William of Orange) stood his lonely vigil over us all.

We commuters had crap. Almost nothing on the campus was designed for us, except this hideous concrete slab of a building that looked out over the Raritan River, and onto Highland Park on the other shore. Glass walls where it wasn't cement and all winding stairwells and cavernous rooms lined with the kinds of couches that once you sat down in them, three people needed to help pull you out.

The Ledge-or to give it its official name, The Rutgers College Commuter lounge was spartan to the extreme. There were two soda machines, one of those 'hot food' machines that you knew from looking in the little glass doors on the front that all the food in it had come with the machine when it was delivered. Nothing went on at the Ledge, ever, except on Friday nights when there was 'a show'.

That's all the hand-lettered signs ever said, 'show'. They never said 'concert', they never said 'dance' they never said 'rumble' and most Fridays they were often all three and more often than not, all at the same time. It was a buck to get in and plastic cups of beer were a quarter. 

It was loud and crowded and as the weeks went on, it got more so. With music, beer, and girls some of us more socially challenged figured this was as close to heaven as we might ever get. We were righter than we thought.

Eventually, more than a few noticed that the bands on stage on those Friday nights, Steel Mill, Sundance Blues Band, and Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, were pretty much the same guys week in and week out. And leading all of these bands was Bruce Springsteen, now rock and roll deity.

He turned seventy-one earlier this week. I don't know that many people I've grown up with that I've also grown old with but back in the day, I didn't know anyone my age now at my age then, so I guess this is progress. 

I've rhapsodized in this space often enough about the energy, earnestness, enthusiasm, and engagement he brings to every performance, so let me not do that for a moment or two and share instead that this year, seemingly for his birthday he shared a present with the faithful, the release of a new album near the end of next month. 

Ghosts is the second single to be offered in advance of that album and I'm thinking it might just get me through the shit sandwich of a year we still have left. Hope it works for you, too. Enjoy.

-bill kenny

#Winning?

Figures lie and liars figure. 

If you doubt that, just look at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in our nation's capital as the man who is not only the worst person in the history of the American Presidency but also the worst person in my lifetime to walk the planet, continues to deny and deflect about his responsibility even as the death toll from his indolence and inattention in reacting to COVID-19 grows daily.

Each a life. Each a tragedy.

This hate-filled orange pus bag of an incompetent and immoral abomination needs to be sent packing on 3 November. And before you ask, no, there's no place hot enough in all of Hades for him and anyone who has enabled him.
-bill kenny

Fine Line Between Fat-Free and Fact-Free

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a Democrat whom a Republican President named as America's ambassador to the United Nations back when we were civil and somewhat respectful in our civil discourse. He was famous for saying 'you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.' 

I'm not sure how he'd feel about that were he to visit us now, here in the 2020 play-at-home-and-stay-at-home version of America, Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave. Talk about Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

It's amazing to me how quickly, with the click of a mouse any of us can find torrents of information to support any perspective or point of view we might have on any issue, great or small, and, thus fortified, can then argue with anonymous strangers on social media in ALL CAPS (which is shouting for the less tech-savvy of us) attempting to persuade them not only of the rightness of our position on whatever the issue is but to also shout them down lest their version of reality intrude into ours. 

As many of us know from bitter first-hand experience, there's trouble when you wander outside the bubble so many of us build to isolate and insulate ourselves from so many others and if you don't believe me, just look around and you'll see it for yourself. But, here's the thing: we get along much better here on earth than we do in whatever reality we've created on-line. 

I like to think of myself as a 'Big Picture Guy' (primarily because I get lost in the tall grass of all the details that an actual grown-up has to master and so I've grown old without actually growing up), so I find it interesting that at the micro-level, if you will, of municipal governance we can have every kind of people in elected office or serving as volunteers on one of the dozens of boards and committees we have here in Norwich and we can disagree with any of them, or even many of them, without ever being disagreeable towards each another. Maybe it's that in many ways we realize this is where we live and we have to go along to get along.  

But, when you take a step back and are at the state level, we're not quite as consumed with that spirit of comity and community as we are at the local level. Where I grew up in Jersey, a state not noted for elegance or eloquence, the rule on trash-talking was always 'no Moms,' but it seems to me the longer we live in COVID-19 times, the enforcement of that rule has grown less stringent. 

By the time we turn our attention to the national stage as we are now in the heat of a Presidential election, well, maybe at this moment the less we say about any of our attempts at dialogue, the better. You'd think with so much at stake, we'd measure twice before cutting once but so far we again seem to be content with a campaign of dueling sound-bytes on the news and the reduction of complex concepts and issues to something that fits on a bumper sticker.   

There's an online meme I like a lot that points out 'listen' and 'silent' use the same letters and I fear that listening to learn and to understand is now a lost art. Instead, we listen to rebut and refute, and if we're lucky we might get an entire thought out of our mouths before someone interjects, interrupts, or otherwise shuts us down. We've sacrificed discussion for diatribe and demonization. And then at the end of the day, we wonder why we are where we are and look for someone to blame, instead of in the mirror.
-bill kenny  

Guess What Day It Is?

Sorry, Camel. The answer we were looking for is National Voter Registration Day...

Democracy is a contact sport. Get in the game. 

-bill kenny

Summer Leaves

I'm bracing for what I know is coming. Spare me the sermon on 'to every season,' I'm not listening and I'm not willing to admit I enjoy any aspect of autumn which starts tomorrow on the calendar but already did at some point a couple of weeks ago around here. 

The leaves silently depart as the light of day grows shorter and the winter of our discontent approaches on cat's feet.
-bill kenny

Leaving Behind a Silver Bullet

Have you ever said, 'I can't remember the name but the face looks familiar?' 

That would NOT have been the case at the Alexandra Palace in North London recently for Spencer Tunick's Everyone Together art installation where he stripped his art down to the bare essentials so to speak. 

I think it just shows Brits are truly cheeky bastards, though in this case, both Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels would have probably approved. Hi Ho Silver!
-bill kenny

Like 2020 Didn't Suck Enough Already

Because it was more dreaded than expected, the news when it came last night was sadder than most of what has gone on in this most-forgettable-for-a-million-other-reasons pathetic excuse for a year. 

"Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a diminutive yet towering women’s rights champion who became the court’s second female justice, died Friday at her home in Washington. She was 87."

Exalted and hallowed be God’s great name

in the world which God created, according to plan.

May God’s majesty be revealed in the days of our lifetime

and the life of all Israel — speedily, imminently,

To which we say: Amen.

Blessed be God’s great name to all eternity.

Blessed, praised, honored, exalted,

extolled, glorified, adored, and lauded

be the name of the Holy Blessed One,

beyond all earthly words and songs of blessing, praise, and comfort.

To which we say: Amen.

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us and all Israel.

To which we say: Amen.

May the One who creates harmony on high, bring peace to us and to all Israel.

To which we say: Amen. 

-bill kenny

A Barely-Remembered Memory

I've been at this a long time and I suspect if you've been reading it for as long as I've been writing this, it feels even longer. This entry is from over a decade ago and I don't mean of the rosary. I called it:

End of the Season

This is the last summer weekend. Back when I was a wee slip of a lad, summers seemed to go on forever. We used to spring out of bed to better get a head start on doing absolutely nothing until late in the afternoon when, with a little luck, a marathon baseball game would break out on the dirt field up the street from the Girard's house. No one kept score and nobody cared who won or lost. Players would come and go for hours, heading home for dinner or to go shopping with Mom and then return hours later sometimes having to be on the other team.

Usually what we did, depending on how good the player returning really was might be that he would have to wait to rejoin the game until another player showed up to balance him out. Mid-inning trades were also not unknown. The games went on until the daylight was dying or, more correctly, had died, and then Mr. Girard would back his car out of the carport and turn the headlights on to wash over the field so we could wrap it finally (until tomorrow when it began again).

We did this for years until someone bought the lot and built a house on it. We all hated the people who moved in to live there. And, much later, when the house burned down, I felt a twinge of guilt even though I had nothing to do with what happened-the power of wishing and its consequences, I guess.

As I got older the summers got shorter and when our Pat and Mike were smaller it was fun to watch the cycle begin again with them. We're weeks away from the 'leaf peeping' that everyone associates with New England weekends in the fall. But for me, it's already too late. I hate autumn-I can smell the scent of all things dying even before they actually do and I'm left with memories of summer to get me through winter into the following spring. Enjoy what you have, while you have it.
-bill kenny

A Simple Wish

As trite as this may sound, I wish all of those who feel they need an AR-15 to 'protect themselves' would feel as strongly about wearing a facemask to protect the rest of us. 

And, Dear Pantload45, the only waiters who oppose wearing facemask are those Waiting for Godot, you over-matched asshat. 
-bill kenny

It Takes All of Us

I've mentioned before how much I enjoy walking in and across Norwich. After almost thirty years of living here I'm confident there's little chance of getting lost and if I do, anyone I'd stop and ask for directions could tell me where to go. They often do it now even without asking so I don't need GPS. 

We have a lot of sidewalks here, though I'm not pretending we have enough, and because of the age of our city and the narrowness of many of our streets we don't really have a lot of space to accommodate bicyclists which is too bad because we have just the kind of terrain and topography many cyclists enjoy combined with great destinations to pedal towards and some gorgeous vistas to enjoy. 

We have a lot here to enjoy, treasure, brag about, and be proud of; and each in our own way, to help make a little better. None of us can everything, but each of us can do something. A flood of improvement comes from individual raindrops of effort and while it's fashionable to wait for someone to do something, it's a lot more satisfying to be that someone yourself. And it's so easy, seriously. 

I've taken to walking with one of the plastic bags we all used to get in the grocery stores when we couldn't use our own recyclable bags during the early months of COVID-19 pandemic precautions. As I walk, be it across town or just around the block, I pick up the detritus and debris so many of us thoughtlessly discard as we merrily and messily roll along. 

I'm not alone in the clean-up efforts, far from it. 

Saint Vincent de Paul Place, with Reliance Health and others and supported by Norwich Public Works, organizes a monthly targeted clean-up, RISE (Recovery Includes Spiritual Empowerment) that draws volunteers from all over, and beyond, Norwich, taking on some of the more blighted and blemished parts (the thorns if you wish) of the different neighborhoods in the Rose of New England. 

The Greenville Revitalization Zone has an ever-expanding effort to in their historic village and just last week along with volunteers from the Norwich Police Department, cleaned up the playground and basketball courts on Central Avenue. Every litter bit hurts but every little bit helps, too. 

Speaking of Greenville, the sidewalk and Central Avenue near The Ideal Skate Shop is almost always spotless and that's not by accident. You don't want to get between Jeff Blayman and discarded trash (and don't ask how I would know that). Walking to his shop, I always pass and say hello to a hard-working sweeper between 8th and 9th Streets who is out in front every day, no matter the weather, grooming up whatever has collected since the day before.  

I love walking through Thamesville which has every kind of architectural style for those who enjoy that sort of thing and lots of residents who are trimming hedges and mowing lawns it seems every time I'm in their neighborhood. It's the same story in Occum, and over on the East Side and in Laurel Hill.

Norwich has an informal alliance of cleaner uppers, they're on Facebook as Cleanup Norwich CT, that you may have read about in mid-July, in the pages of The Bulletin, who hit the streets on a regular and recurring basis to gather up the gunk and garbage so many of us seem to no longer see. It's not their job, they just think someone should be doing it and so they are. 

We make Norwich what it is by being the best of who we are. Stop waiting for someone to step up and make a difference and try being that person yourself. Helping can be habit-forming and maybe just what we need to be doing right now.
-bill kenny

Awfully Autumnal

It's only fair, I know, having spent most of this summer of our discontent bleating and complaining about the heat or humidity (or both together) that I should be somewhat saddened and surprised to discover as I did yesterday morning on the Chelsea Parade up the street from my house that Autumn has stolen a march on me.

And all I can do is sigh.
-bill kenny

A Walk on the Mild Side

Yesterday I decided to make double sure my request for an absentee ballot for November's election was in good hands. I walked down Broadway (I love typing that) to where it becomes Union Street to our City Hall where I had my choice of depositing the request in the mailbox on the Broadway side (what I call the uphill) entrance or in the collection box installed by the Secretary of State for the applications as well as the actual absentee ballots. 

I grabbed some images of familiar and somewhat less than familiar sights on my way back home. I hope you enjoy them.

I never tire of looking at City Hall

The flowers in bloom on the Broadway side are a bonus

Across from Little Plains Park

A lot of work went into reclaiming this house

-bill kenny

To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time

One of the lingering benefits (loosely used in my case) of a prep school education was immersion in what was offered as classics of English literature. I thought of Robert Herrick's poem when I encountered this brave-beyond-all-words essay, and perhaps, last will and testament, from Elliot Dallen.

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May by John Waterhouse

I'm not crying; you are.
-bill kenny

And How About Gluten-Free Brake Jobs?

I'm living proof that Freedom of Speech is priceless because if we had to pay for it by the word, some of us would be as bankrupt financially as we are philosophically. 

But freedom of speech is at the absolute heart of our democracy and in every one of our forums and public meetings, from the hallowed halls of Congress to the more humble ones of our seats of local government,  there's always a moment when each of us as citizens has our say.

How we exercise that freedom is sometimes overshadowed by what we choose to speak about as happened here, appropriately enough, in America's heartland, Lincoln, Nebraska. So order up a large bucket (extra crispy if you'd like), claim your favorite dipping sauce, and enjoy.
-bill kenny 

Remembering Is the Easy Part

This is the day that no amount of time passage will allow any wounds to ever heal. This is the day whose arrival you dread months before it gets here. This is the day when words fail and dark deeds done by cowards take center stage. This is the day whose memories, no matter what the date on the calendar is, are as fresh as the instant in which they first happened.

The recollections of first hearing that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center (immediate reaction was how could this happen?) chased but moments later by the announcement that a second aircraft had also hit the complex (and now the how was replaced by why?).

The mad rush to computers, servers overloaded and shutdown, followed by the dash to television sets as the world slowly joined a seance of beyond-epic proportions and the scale and scope of the catastrophe in the heart of the capital of the world started to be realized and recognized. "Believers and infidels are fighting in the heat, while bodies of the innocent are covered with a sheet."

So overwhelming are individual and collective recollections of what we've come to call 9/11 that almost forgotten are the human beings, the dead and damaged at the Pentagon, and the total destruction near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that marked the fiery end of Flight 93. 

At some point long ago we forgot that people who have nothing to live for will always find something to die for and then they will want you to die for it, too. But 9/11 makes sure we shall always remember. As Winston Churchill observed a lifetime before the carnage arrived on the Lower East Side, 'a fanatic is someone who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject.' 

The black spot on the calendar is nothing compared to the black hole and the hurt that never heals in the heart. For those with friends and family who went off to work that day, boarded a plane, rode a bus, had an errand that took them into one of the buildings attacked, were emergency responders or in circumstances of which, perhaps, only Thornton Wilder could conceive, the pain never ceases and the memories never dull.

But for some removed from the epicenter, who began as unwitting spectators, as we move farther from the actual day of the event the ache dulls, they lose sight of the pain in the soul of America would do well to remember others like Susan Retik, working to light candles. I came across this profile a decade ago and would encourage you to spend a moment considering how you can join those who've chosen to be a light rather than a horn.

We will triumph, as a nation, as a culture, as a way of life- not because we have more bombs and bullets, though there's a place for both (and I know young men and women in, and heading into, harm's way at this moment who will need both), but because of who we are in moments of great peril, of imminent danger and in enormous sorrow and loss. 

We will triumph because we define ourselves by listening to our better angels and focusing on what we have yet to do, not dwelling on the evil visited upon us. And because of that, we will always win, and those who hate us will always lose."Spirits above and behind me/Faces gone, black eyes burnin' bright/May their precious blood forever bind me/Lord as I stand before your fiery light."

-bill kenny

You Go First

I'm guessing a lot of Houston Texans and Kansas City Chiefs fans are counting down the hours until the 2020 NFL season kicks off and I wouldn't be surprised that the season's first game is of more than passing interest to anyone who follows American football, starved for pigskin pleasure as they have been for all these many months. Present company excepted, quite frankly, but you be you.

I've seen in recent years in a variety of media venues that the NFL is called America's National Past Time but I think this poster by my bus stop buddy actually reveals our dirty little secret and real national past time. Gam(bl)ing.

Yep, wait until betting on any and all sports (Pee-Wee Football included I'm sure) happens and you'll see all those unemployed horses, complete with jockeys in briefs offering you a ride in Central Park. No need to shove, there's plenty of space on the wagon and all kinds of time.
-bill kenny 

The Trouble with this Friday Is....

Nineteen years ago this Friday, the world as we know it in this country, ended for many and changed forever for the rest of us. 

I don't have to type anything beyond 9/11 because each of us has our own memories, reactions, and feelings about the day two hijacked passenger jets smashed into the World Trade Towers in Lower Manhattan leading to their collapse while another hijacked plane burrowed nose-first into the Pentagon while a struggle between the hijackers and the passengers on the fourth plane resulted in its crashing in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

On that single day, 2,977 people died, and more than 6,000 others were injured in the deadliest terrorist attack in world history. It's estimated that more than 2,000 of the first responders who were in and around the World Trade Center have since died as a result of illnesses caused by exposure to dust from the site and nearly 10,000 first responders and others who were in the area that day have been diagnosed with cancer.  

So many words have been written and spoken about that day they would fill libraries and are nevertheless despite their volume and eloquence pitifully inadequate in capturing the heartache, anger, terror, sorrow, and unnamable emotions but also the resolve and solidarity not only of Americans but people all over the world felt (with us) as those events unfolded live on television and for the days, weeks and months during which they were replayed and reprised without surcease. 

I don't mention all of this, or actually, ANY of it because I think or believe there's a chance that any of us would, or could, forget, but rather to try to remember how I believe we felt as that day in September unfolded and in the weeks that followed. 

I'm trying especially hard right now when I look at who we are at this moment in our own history and wonder how we seem to have lost our way, just when the world around us needs us most. I searched for "US News Headlines on 8 September 2001" and the New York Times' summary that was returned, reads like a postcard from another planet.  

Read it for yourself and I think you'll agree that we were blithely oblivious to the blinding animus towards us that had already unleashed a tsunami of terror only hours away from nearly overwhelming us.

Almost two decades on, how are we spending our days? Battling, belittling, and badgering one another like Dr. Seuss' infamous star-bellied and plain-bellied Sneetches, with all the shades and hues of reds and blues imaginable as we fight about our perspectives rather than focus on the challenges and opportunities before us until we've created irreconcilable chasms beyond understanding or bridging, leaving us to shout ourselves hoarse rather than listen. 

But on September 11, 2001, we were One America, there for each other no matter who we were, what we believed, or who we voted for because the only way through where we were was to be one. 

That determination, resolve, and effort to understand one another after what we thought was the end of our world is what we should be honoring, remembering, and living every day. The trouble with this Friday is is the memories of our moment of unity and purpose happens only once a year.
-bill kenny

Kids These Days

As a card-carrying codger whose best-buy date has, luckily for me, expired before I have, I've long believed in that well-known quote from an even bigger codger, George Bernard Shaw, 'youth is wasted on the young.' 

I am, however, making an exception for, among all the young people, these three from right here in Norwich, Connecticut, whom I never met (but their luck will perhaps eventually run out), Nathan Concepcion, Ny'Asia Bermudez, and Janiyah Jarmon. 

They will be celebrated this evening with a Proclamation by the Norwich City Council for their efforts to make where they (and I) live just a bit better than it was the day before. You can follow along via the Public Access television channel.

All three, and hundreds (actually thousands) across the country and around the world have completed the Raising Men and Women Lawn Care Service (Making a Difference One Lawn at a Time) "50 Yard Challenge" which has NOTHING to do with football and EVERYTHING to do with looking out for those in our neighborhoods in need of a helping hand. 

When you click on the link above, you'll learn about Rodney Smith and his efforts to do what he can to make this a better world, and you'll also have an opportunity to make a secure donation so he can do even more (<==HINT). 

And hats off to Nathan, Ny'Asia, and Janiyah for making my/our day. Literally!
-bill kenny   

 

Part of My Labor Day Tradition

I like to be a constant in the universe and so often miss the mark. Not this time when we've lost close to thirty million jobs from last year to this while being told because Wall Street is doing so great we should all be farting through silk. Some observations from a Labor Day Past.

Our current President keeps reminding us that the stock market is at some of the highest levels in its history but I've yet to encounter anyone, anywhere who can explain what that's supposed to mean in a nation where less than half of us own stock at all. The way I see it, all his crowing does is exacerbate the difference between Wall Street and Main Street. 

Of course, if you have one of his red ballcaps (made in China) with the campaign slogan he kited from Reagan written on it, those aren't questions you ask, which is what the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is counting on, so keep up the good work. As for the rest of us, Labor Day is very different than what it was when we were kids growing up.        

"There's a Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign

Sitting there by the left turn line

The flag on his wheelchair flapping in the breeze

One leg missing and both hands-free

No one's paying much mind to him

The V.A. budget's just stretched so thin

And now there's more coming back from the Mideast war

We can't make it here anymore."

"And that big ol' building was the textile mill

That fed our kids and it paid our bills

But they turned us out and they closed the doors

'Cause we can't make it here anymore

You see those pallets piled up on the loading dock

They're just gonna sit there til they rot

Cause there's nothing to ship, nothing to pack

Just busted concrete and rusted tracks

Empty storefronts around the square

There's a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere

You don't come down here unless you're looking to score

We can't make it here anymore."

"The bar's still open but man it's slow

The tip jar's light and the register's low

The bartender don't have much to say

The regular crowd gets thinner each day

Some have maxed out all their credit cards

Some are working two jobs and living in cars

Minimum wage won't pay for a roof, won't pay for a drink

If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. C.E.O.

See how far 5.15 an hour will go

Take a part-time job at one of your stores

I bet you can't make it here anymore."

"And there's a high school girl with a bourgeois dream

Just like the pictures in the magazine

She found on the floor of the laundromat

A woman with kids can forget all that

If she comes up pregnant what'll she do

Forget the career and forget about school

Can she live on faith? Live on hope?

High on Jesus or hooked on dope

When it's way too late to just say no

You can't make it here anymore."

"Now I'm stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store

Just like the ones we made before

'Cept this one came from Singapore

I guess we can't make it here anymore."

"Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin

Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I'm in

Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today

No, I hate the men sent the jobs away

I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams

All lily-white and squeaky clean

They've never known want, they'll never know need

Their shit don't stink and their kids won't bleed

Their kids won't bleed in their damn little war

And we can't make it here anymore."

"Will I work for food, will I die for oil

Will kill for power and to us the spoils

The billionaires get to pay less tax

The working poor get to fall through the cracks

So let 'em eat jellybeans let 'em eat cake

Let 'em eat shit, whatever it takes

They can join the Air Force or join the Corps

If they can't make it here anymore."

"So that's how it is, that's what we got

If the president wants to admit it or not

You can read it in the paper, read it on the wall

Hear it on the wind if you're listening at all

Get out of that limo, look us in the eye

Call us on the cell phone tell us all why

In Dayton, Ohio or Portland, Maine

Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains

That's done closed down along with the school

And the hospital and the swimming pool

Dust devils dance in the noonday heat

There's rats in the alley and trash in the street

Gang graffiti on a boxcar door

We can't make it here anymore."

-James McMurtry

-bill kenny

More than Just Summer's Last Hurrah

Everywhere I've gone in the course of the last few days has Labor Day Sales, from automobiles to factory outlet stores. We should all be so lucky as to have the money that all these folks want us to spend, whether we need their goods and services or not. 

That all of these places are open and in some cases have 'extended hours' to celebrate people and the work they do seems to pass without any notice of an irony deficiency on anyone's part. 

I was a member of a workforce from the age of fifteen and am fortunate (and grateful) to be retired now, though yelling at whippersnappers to stay off my lawn is nearly a full-time job. 

If you have this weekend or even just today or tomorrow off, I'm happy for you because you've earned the respite. If you have to work, all I can offer is my sincere gratitude and hope all of us will someday be someplace where any and all work is accorded the dignity and compensation it deserves.

-bill kenny

Avoiding the Holiday Rush

Which is easier to do this year than in any previous years in my memory because it feels very little like a holiday for anyone.

"End of the day, factory whistle cries. Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes."

-bill kenny

How the Last Can Influence the First

I'm counting down the days until "Sleepy" (Hides in His Basement) Joe Biden debates that "Lying Weasel Racist" Donald Jenius Trump on Tuesday, 29 September at 9 PM, DST, on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.  In essence, the last Tuesday of this month could impact the first Tuesday of November.

I'm wondering if President Covfefe is already looking for someone to stand-in for him much like he did for his college entrance exams, and as happened when his draft board gave him deferments for college and later for bone spurs. 

I make no pretense at being impartial (or measured in my disdain for the Beige Buffoon); I'd like to see Biden rip his head off and shit down Trump's throat in the first ninety seconds, more or less as his opening statement.

I'm kidding of course. I don't care when Biden does it just as long as he does BUT BEFORE there's anything resembling a debate, how about a stage with just the two of them, no audience and one moderator and one fact-checker to call balls and strikes in real time. 

We'll use a chess clock to make sure neither of them wanders too far afield or gets so lost in the tall grass no one wants to go find them. But first, before any and all of that, as Biden already has, Trump must also release (finally) his tax returns.

And then we'll see what happens.  
-bill kenny